The first temple to be consecrated by the Dogras at Srinagar is Gadadhar Temple, again a temple dedicated to Lord Vishnu, which was built in the heart of the Shergarhi, once the citadel of the Afghan rulers of Kashmir. Like the Karkotas, the Dogra house also tried to recast Kashmir as a “Vaishnavite land”. The commissioning of temples dedicated to the deity was a conscious attempt in this direction, though, in the end, it failed to reshape the native Hindu community. However, the transfer of this new cultural and artistic tradition from the plains was not new.

Even earlier, when Ranjit Singh’s army had freshly arrived in Kashmir, marking an end to five centuries of uninterrupted Muslim rule, one of the initial acts of the new rulers was the construction of two temples in the city, the Anandeshwar Temple at Maisuma, right opposite to the royal citadel of Shergarhi, and the Devi Temple at Pokhribal on the site of the former Mughal city of Naagar Nagar. Both were constructed in the same year, 1820, by Kashmir’s first Sikh subedar, Diwan Moti Ram. Both the temples were commissioned around a natural feature by the Hindu and Muslim citizenry of the city. Yet the architecture of the temples is of Punjabi origin. Interestingly, both sites still retain the original chronograms written in Persian. The one at Maisuma reads:

With the grace of Shivji, Shri Ram, and the King whose name is Nanak
His benevolent shadow falls over the head of Ranjit Singh
It was one thousand and eight hundred and seventy seven when
The foundation of this temple was laid by the powerful hand of Moti Ram 1220 AH (1820 CE)

While the Anandeshwar and Devi Temples largely withstood the political turmoil in the region, the same is not true of Raghunath Mandir. Recently, the government renovated the temple, and the once-white walls were replaced by something more similar to canary yellow, though the engineers responsible would call it ochre. Similarly, the painted sheets that many in the past might have misconstrued as gilded gold are repainted in a bright red: a cross somewhere in between auburn and wine red.

My first visit to the temple took place on a cold, grey winter evening. The temple compound, which once opened majestically to the Jhelum River, welcoming worshippers, was equally desolate, the site overgrown with stinging nettle, making the approach to the main building even more painful. The surrounding houses, once a part of a Pandit neighbourhood, were slowly disintegrating, one element at a time – a window missing here, a wall crumbling there, a door long burnt. Historical ruins are generally impressive, but it would have required some imagination to be impressed by the view – it was as depressing as it gets. The main temple chamber is surrounded by a corridor – the parikrama, used by devotees to circumambulate the inner sanctum. Hindus perform the parikrama in a clockwise direction, a practice that is repeated even at Muslim shrines of Kashmir, whose plans borrow from those of a temple, with the saint’s burial place replacing the site of the idol chamber.

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Historically, Muslims circumambulate (tawaf) the Kaaba at Mecca in an anti-clockwise direction. Does the Kashmiri Muslim performance then replicate an age-old Hindu ritual? Some would argue that the practice was adopted to differentiate a local, non-sacrosanct ritual from a prescribed rite of Hajj pilgrimage. Muslim day-to-day culture in the city borrows from both its Buddhist and Hindu past in a myriad of ways and manners which are representative of the syncretic roots of the city’s culture and functioning.

When I visited, in one corner of the temple corridor, a group of young boys – probably teenagers – were squatting tightly together around a makeshift fire, playing cards and smoking what I assume was charas (cannabis). People in the city generally like to talk; we like to converse. So, after some time, the uncomfortable silence ceased. We spoke – they, the only housekeepers of an abandoned temple, and me, an unwanted intruder. I must have sounded overwhelming patronising with my countless inane questions. Some they answered, and some they chose to ignore, typical of the way teenagers navigate their conversations outside their peer groups: with a cycle of monosyllables, extended moments of silence, and then rapid bursts of meaningful sentences. The once-whitewashed walls of the corridor were black from the soot and smoke, all indicators of the numerous fires, around which the boys must have sat and smoked. Not so the main sanctum, the garbhagriha, where once the missing idols used to be. The floor of the sanctum bore no trace of fire. I asked the boys if they ever took refuge in the sanctum and if they ever smoked there, and the answer was “no”. Why? One of them replied: “Aati ass yim paran (They [Hindus] used to read [pray] here).”

Excerpted with permission from City of Kashmir, Srinagar: A Popular History, Sameer Hamdani, Hachette India.